Faire Magazine

Monday, May 18, 2009

Although Saturday's gate count was just over 500 folks, every one of them had an incredible time at The Virginia Renaissance Festival. The new vendors were awesome and some of the more seasoned vendors had permanent buildings!! The place is growing in leaps and bounds and if you need to get your faire-on, this is the event to start with.

Saturday saw some personal ups and downs (literally ups and downs). Up because folks like Mike & Joanne, Blair and April, showed up to hang with me for a bit in the new version of the Pyrates Way/Faire Magazine tent (when it was up). Then came a huge gust of wind and pulled the whole thing down. . . . so I had to set it up as version #2 which held up the rest of the day. Then the big winds and über-rain started and I took the tent down myself during the night . . . . put it all away as the rains got worse in the a.m. and bugged out before the show opened. VARF also experienced some wind/rain damage, including a corner of the pub tent collapsing (repairs were underway when I left).

I STILL had a blast and can't wait to get back down there this coming weekend as all the McCrack family show up to party. I'm going down there early on Friday to set up tent version #3 (de-bugging and redesign has been underway since 6 a.m.).

Go to : www.varf.org for more information on the festival and then GO!

Monday, February 9, 2009

It's their cash that pays for the printing and mailing. Without them we can have everything ready to go to press and the magazine comes to a screeching halt. The economy has hit potential advertisers hard but a lot of them don't realize that not-advertising will only make it worse.

Thus, we're still offering a quarter-page, full color ad for only $150 (less than the set up fee of a lot of pirate festivals), with the potential to reach thousands (since our magazine has been picked up by Amazon.com and we're on the shelves right next to our competition who charge hundreds more for the same size ad).

So if you want your issues asap. . . go nag at your buddy the leatherworker or your sister who makes jewelry or the guy at faire that you spend a few hundred with over the faire season.

Sunday, February 1, 2009

It seems one of our sister publications is passing on. Realms of Fantasy's last issue will be the April issue, this after almost going 100 issues strong. The magazine was chock-filled with art, articles, and fiction that gave many writers and artists their first chance at paid publication.

Apparently, according to the article at SFScope, the same reasons we're struggling lead to the closing of Realms of Fantasy:

"The reasons she was given for the closure were plummeting newsstand sales. "Subscriptions are good, and advertising, until very recently, was fine." She blamed the economic downturn and newsstand distribution for the closure."